The Bizarre Trump-Fueled Backlash to Healthy School Lunches

MAGA comes to the cafeteria.

Party of One Studio

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Back in 2010, then–first lady Michelle Obama launched a nefarious scheme to turn school cafeterias into liberal indoctrination zones. Or at least that’s how Obama’s right-wing opponents portrayed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a law she spearheaded that gave the National School Lunch Program its first nutritional update in more than 15 years. Her treachery included requirements for more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and limits on calories in meals. “Here’s Michelle Obama trying to take over the school lunch program,” Rush Limbaugh warned his radio audience. Media outlets flaunted photos of kids dumping their lunches into the trash, supposedly taken after the reforms went into effect. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) sponsored a bill to nullify the nutrition rules in 2012, decrying what he called a “misguided nanny state” that “would put every child on a diet.”

The nanny-state rhetoric got attention. Less atten­tion-getting was the fact that Obama’s critics were attacking improvements to a crucial anti-­poverty program. Of the nearly 30 million kids who eat school lunches every day, 20 million qualify for free lunch—and another 1.8 million receive it at a reduced price. Altogether, these kids rely on school meals for nearly half their daily calories and 40 percent of their vegetable intake, making the program a “safety net for low-income children,” a 2016 study from Baylor University researchers found.

Hear more about school-cafeteria politics—including another Michele Obama reform that allows high-poverty schools offer universal free lunch—in the latest episode of Bite podcast:

For decades, companies like Tyson Foods and Domino’s have found a prominent market in school cafeterias, wooing administrators with entrees like chicken nuggets and pizza, which please kids, require minimal preparation, and don’t strain tight budgets. The Obama rules didn’t overhaul this paradigm, says Bettina Elias Siegel, author of the forthcoming book Kid Food, but “overall there’s no question that school meals got healthier.”

King’s school lunch bill stalled in Congress, but the right-wing zeal for reversing Obama’s agenda stayed on a slow boil. Then, in 2016, a man obsessed with taco bowls and Big Macs claimed the presidency. Just before Donald Trump took office, the far-right House Freedom Caucus released a hit list of more than 300 rules and regulations that urgently needed to be revoked or examined in his first 100 days. First on the list: the Obama lunch reforms.

In May 2017, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue appeared at an elementary school in Virginia, vowing to “Make School Meals Great Again.” Echoing Freedom Caucus talking points, Perdue announced that “if kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition.” He also asserted that procuring whole grain foods like pasta was imposing “problematic” costs on cafeterias. For good measure, he added that “I wouldn’t be as big as I am today without chocolate milk.”

For all the bluster,  Perdue’s new rules, put into law in February 2019, represented a fairly modest rollback. The Obama guidelines stipulated that starches like pasta and buns must contain at least 50 percent whole grains and that chocolate milk could contain no fat. Perdue cut the grain requirement in half and allowed flavored 1 percent milk. He weakened a mandate to cut salt levels, but he left calorie limits and requirements for more fruit and vegetables intact.

Meanwhile, researchers contracted by his own department were studying the impact of the Obama-era reforms. The results, quietly released in April, demonstrate that the conservative backlash was based on nonsense. The USDA study compared school years before and after the Obama reforms. It turns out that serving healthier food did not result in significantly higher costs for cafeterias or mean more food going into the garbage. The reforms did, however, result in healthier lunches—more whole grains, greens, and beans, as well as fewer “empty calories” (added sugar and solid fats) and less sodium. And maybe most importantly, the cafeterias that delivered higher healthy-food scores also had significantly higher rates of students choosing to eat the lunches. That same month, attorneys general from six states and the District of Columbia sued the USDA, charging that the rollbacks were made without public input and were “not based on tested nutritional research.”

Cafeteria administrators haven’t had much appetite for Perdue’s alter­ations, either. Anneliese Tanner is the food services director for the Austin, Texas, school district, where more than half of all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Obama-era reforms, she says, prompted her cafeterias to move to whole grains, and “the kids have gotten used to them, more or less.” For Tanner, school lunches are not a front in a culture war, but an effective way to nourish kids who might not otherwise have access to nutritious food. “Would they eat more white flour tortillas and white pasta? Probably,” she says. “Is that our focus? No. We’re going to stay the course and focus on our kids’ health.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate